15 March 2007

Eet's a joke

Before I start, let me say I somehow accidentally turned off comments on my last post, the one about pronunciation and liaisons with the word euro. Now I've turned the comments back on. Thanks to Claude of Blogging in Paris for making me realize there was something funny going on.

Speaking of funny, I want to tell you a joke I heard at a dinner party yesterday. In French. The woman who told it is Josette, who was the previous owner of our house. She'll be 80 in June. She said she heard this joke on the radio a few days ago. Here goes:
Un Australien prend un boomerang et il colle une rondelle de saucisson dessus.

Puis il prend un deuxième boomerang et il colle une rondelle de saucission dessus.

Et ainsi de suite jusqu'à ce qu'il y ait six boomerangs, chacun avec une rondelle de saucisson collée dessus.

Ensuite, il lance les six boomerangs.

Il s'agit de deviner à quelle saison de l'année tout cela se passe. Devinez...

Evidemment, c'est le printemps. Comment le sait-on ? Parce que les six rondelles sont revenues !
Get it?

The play on words has to do with those birds that come back to Capistrano in the spring, which in French are les hirondelles.

The Australian joke makes me think of the French elections and the far-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen. He announced yesterday that he had succeeded in getting the required 500 officials to sign his petition, so he can get on the ballot again. He's come back, a little like a rondelle de saucisson stuck on a boomerang.

Here's another joke, a literary one:
La question :

Quel grand auteur anglais a inventé le trou dans la baignoire ?

La réponse :

C'est Shakespeare. Il l'a inventé pour ôter l'eau !

Get it?

The expression ôter l'eau sounds just like Othello! But you have to pronounce it the French way, with a T instead of a TH.

That's enough for today.

5 comments:

  1. Liked your jokes. One thing about JM Le Pen though, rondelles de saucisson look, taste and ARE much better. Anyway, I am sure he had his 500 signatures, but complaining and claiming he is persecuted is his game.It's a recurring --and boring-- theme.
    Thanks for posting my previous comment.

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  2. Claude is probably right. Le Pen(ible) probably cooked it all up for a little extra press. But I would be delighted if he would siphon off enough votes from Sar-not-at-all-kozy and leave a final race between Royal and Bayrou. That would just tickle me pink. The final result would then most likely be Bayrou which is still further right than my preference, but I'm probably never going to see a candidate who is left on social issues and moderate on fiscal issues. In France that concept seems to amount to an oxymoron. I said moderate on fiscal issues because obviously France has to get realistic if it is going to compete in the current global market. But I'm afraid I will never be convinced that a completely free market society can be humane. Our species is simply not yet civilized enough.

    Then there's that laisser-faire dollar thing ... ouch... for those of us who left at just the wrong moment. But that's a personal issue.

    Of course, (cough) I try to stay out of politices. I would prefer to chat about the inevitable expatriate obsession with the language. Fascinating. :))) But some of the observations don't apply in my neck of the woods. We are talking THICK accent. C'est d'oc.

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  3. I'm sure Claude is right about Le Pen's phoney hand-wringing. He's just looking for plenty of publicity during the signature-collection phase, and trying to cast himself as the pitiful underdog, the victim of "le système."

    As for the dollar, you said it! But I blame Bush for that.

    At least the French socialists are honest about the budget issues. In the U.S., we get the worst of both worlds -- rightist policies, no benefits, and huge deficits. Spend the money on guns, not butter.

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  4. I get the joke(s). The title, too.

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  5. Cheryl, I knew you would get the jokes and the title. Fond memories, no?

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